Episode 9: Warp Drives With Zach Weinersmith

In episode 9, Its back to the A team (which stands for Apple, which points to “g”, cuz their words have weight!) with Jocelyn Read and Dave Tsang! Today We’re talking about the Alcubierre Warp Drive. You’ve probably heard of this before, There’s a lot of buzz on this topic. Oh, we definitely brought our Bee game to this episode!

23 thoughts on “Episode 9: Warp Drives With Zach Weinersmith”

This discussion was awesome! Fascinating stuff. I’m a big fan of Zach’s and SMBC (where I came across the link to this podcast) and I’ll likely be back to check out more episodes. Now to start harvesting some negative energy from those emo teenagers…

Also, the books go kind of ‘out there’ at times, but I’d suggest reading Travis S. Taylor’s “Warp Speed” and “The Quantum Connection”. In those books they discuss FTL travel via Alcubierre drive powered by the Casimir effect. Something they also talk about in the books are devices that compress space into a small size, around the Planck length if viewed from the outside; however, much, much larger inside. So it could be possible to construct the tiny drive within that compressed space, that only has to effect a very small space. Something like that.

Re: “Cooking”. What if you just turned it off once in a while? To prevent the accumulation of radiation? What about the sides of the bubble? Can photons escape through the sides? If so, could you build “sinks” around the sides of the bubble, to conduct radiation to the outside?

Also, if I understand correctly, the random particles would show up and get “stuck” at the front, but not the back, right?

Hey lesle.
this note isn’t to justify interrupting and talking over jocelyn. I probably do it… a lot. and you are right, it is rude.

this is just to say that *after* we’ve finished talking, i edit the episode, cutting out as much of the *ums* and the breaks in conversation, and sometimes entire bits of conversation. so. in reality, we’re not quite that rude to each other.

My friend sent me this article today about a variant of this warp drive that would require much less energy. In fact it says here that it could be powered by a mass smaller than that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. If you have the time to read it, please let me know what you think Ben. If you’ve already addressed this elsewhere, could you please refer me to it so I can respond to my friend? Thanks!

yeah, the whole “use less mass than voyager 1” is probably true. i have no doubt that tinkering with the geometry would do it.

the problem is the negative energy itself. there is only one candidate for it, the casimir effect, and it comes from quantum mechanics, and as far as i understand it, no one has ever shown that the casimir effect actually has negative gravitational mass.

i should do a show on the casimir effect. i should also look up the spelling.

So one of my hoobies is performing mental experiments and there is one that involves me (in an interstellar cruiser ) negotiating a worm hole . Now for me the benefits of mental experiments are the questions that arise from said simulations. So my question is as follows : How can matter exist in an “environment ” inside a worm hole ? I mean if a wormhole is rip in the fabric of space-time then how can space(matter/me) enter said rip ?

Hi Paul
so wormholes are theoretical,
but they’re place where two parts of spacetime are joined together. there isn’t a rip. It’s like… imagine that you drilled a hole through a table. an ant walking along the surface of the table would be able to walk THROUGH the hole, no problem. there will always be table under his feet.

so yes, matter could exist inside a wormhole.
(that said, it would need to have a lot of gravitationally repulsive matter to keep the thing from collapsing down on itself)